https://jameshaytonphd.

com/quick-tips/how-to-read-academic-journal-article

How to learn to read an academic

journal article
Instead of focusing on how to read an individual article, let's think about
what you're actually trying to achieve. Are you trying to build your
knowledge of the field? Or trying to understand a specific technical point?
Are you trying to find a gap in the literature? Depending on the answer, the
papers you choose to read, and what parts of those papers you focus on,
should be different.

Of these, the first aim should be to build some knowledge of the field. How
do you do this without drowning in thousands of sources?

1. Identify the most influential sources

Journal articles can be divided into two main categories; there are
groundbreaking, influential papers that change the way the field thinks or
operates, then there are incremental papers that just add a little bit, but
don't have a huge impact.If you understand the influential, groundbreaking
work, this gives you a foundation for understanding the incremental work
that followed. Fortunately, there are relatively few of these groundbreaking
papers and they are easy to identify (because they are highly cited).

Try to find around 5 highly influential sources related to a specific topic. If

you can understand;

 what they discovered/ invented/ proposed

 what problem this discovery/ invention/ proposal attempted to solve

Then you have a good start. However, there's a problem...

If you look just at those original sources, they might be very hard to
understand. Simply re-reading them won't necessarily help, because
academic articles usually assume a lot of pre-existing knowledge.

2. Focus on the concepts you identify, not the

sources
If you've identified important developments in the field, but don't really
understand them, you now have a new aim; to find sources that explain
those concepts.

Primary research articles may not be the best things to focus on, because
they aren't written to teach. Instead, look for textbooks, review articles,
Wikipedia pages, YouTube videos, or people in your institution you can
ask.Y

ou can go back to the original source later. For now it's enough to know
where the idea came from, while looking elsewhere for an initial
explanation.

3. How did these concepts influence the field?

A key part of understanding the literature is understanding trends in your
field. So what effect did these influential papers have?

For example, did a particular theory spark a bitter debate in the field? Did a
particular invention open up new possibilities for research? Or did a
particular discovery reshape the fundamental understanding of some
phenomenon?

This gives you an initial, broad context for understanding some of the finer
detail contained within the literature. But equally importantly it gives a focus
to your reading; a specific, achievable aim that isn't too overwhelming.

4. How to read journal articles for context

You can strengthen this contextual knowledge by reading the introductions
of recent papers. Every research article starts with a brief overview of the
background and current state of the art, so reading just the introductions of
a few recent journal articles is a great way to get a quick summary of what's
happening in the field.

You may find that a lot of them say more or less the same thing. In this
case, you know what the field considers to be important. Or if you see they
all say contradictory things, you know that there is no consensus in the
field.

Again, the aim determines how you read the individual journal articles and
what you focus on.
5. Get some practical experience
It isn't enough to know how to read a journal article. You will find that it gets
much easier to read and understand once you have some practical
research experience. It's by doing research yourself and making mistakes
that you're able to spot problems in the published literature and to really
appreciate the best work that's been done.

Reading helps with the practical work, but the practical work helps reading
too.

How to read a journal article once

you've got a bit of experience
Once you've built up some broader contextual knowledge, you can think
about how to read a journal article in isolation.

Many people advise reading the abstract first, then the conclusion, then
going back to the introduction. The exact order varies (and this one
advises skipping the abstract altogether), but it's basically a way of
systematically assessing whether the article is worth reading in depth.

Again, though, I'd say that how you read should depend on what you want
to achieve and what led you to the article in the first place. Context is
everything. You might read differently depending on whether you've just
done a search that gave you 5000 results and need to filter through them,
or you've done a search that resulted in 5. In the former case, filtering by
title initially is the only way to go. In the latter case, slow down and read
everything.If you found a paper because you've noticed a lot of relevant
sources referring to it, it's probably best to treat it like one of the ground-
breaking papers, but also noting what the authors you have already read
are saying about it.

So you have to adapt, but as a general approach to reading journal

articles...

Read the introduction first

I would usually advise reading the introduction first. The introduction should
set out what the paper aims to do, and if you skip this then nothing else will
make sense.
The first thing to look for is what problem they are working on. If it isn't
clear, or if the problem isn't interesting to you, move on to the next article.

What you do next depends on the immediate relevance to your project

Key point:
Different literature will be useful to you at different times, depending on
what you are trying to achieve. You may re-visit some sources several
times throughout your PhD, and what isn't relevant or useful now may
become useful later.
If the work seems highly relevant to what you are doing, or helps you to
solve a current problem in your research, either slow down and read
carefully, or if you don't have time, put it to one side but make sure you
have a way of remembering where to find it later.

You don't have to summarize everything

Some say that you should summarize everything you read, but I don't think
this is the most important thing to do. It's possible to fill fifty notebooks with
summaries, but that isn't the same as having knowledge.

What you need is a picture of the literature (the key discoveries, most
relevant articles and the trends in the field) which you carry in your head at
all times. Then you where to look to find relevant sources to fill in some
details when you need to.

What I did in my own PhD was build up collections of literature around

certain topics. I put printed copies into ring-binders by sub topic. Any notes
were taken in the margins of the paper, so they stayed in context with the
whole text.

I knew which were crucial to my work and I knew which were most
influential. I also knew the kinds of problems that were being worked on in
the field, and what techniques were being used, and I knew where to look
to find details when relevant.